Is Robert J. Marks the Greatest Scientist of Our Generation?

2008 saw the release of Ben Stein's "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed", a documentary on the prejudice of Intelligent Design theory in the academic world. The film looked at the controversy surrounding many recent events where universities across the nation denied tenure or outright fired professors for ascribing to an intelligent design view of the universe. One of the professors profiled in "Expelled", Dr. Robert J. Marks, had a page hosted on one of Baylor's servers taken down due to it's promotion of intelligent design. I decided to dig deeper into the man behind such a controversy at my university. Is he just a "nut" or maybe a rouge professor who knew the right people to get his job. What I found out is that perhaps the smartest man of the 21^st century, helping develop technology like the wireless mouse, is also a creationist and a proponent of what the academic world has label a psuedo-science.

Here a just a few of Dr. Marks' contributions to the advancement of the scientific world. Marks and fellow colleagues, then at University of Washington, developed a sophisticated way of predicting power demands on utility grids using what he calls an "artificial neural network". Usually just called "neural networks", neural networks are essentially just computational models to measure non-linear statistical data.

In true renaissance fashion Robert Marks also used his genius level knowledge of statistical models to track radioactive seeds in cancerous prostates in real time! Marks and his team would receive the Judith Stitt Best Abstract Award from the American Brachytherapy Society, brachytherapy is radiotherapy where a radioactive source is placed next or inside the area needing treatment.

In the area of detection theory, or just the ability to determine whether radio waves are just noise or an actual signal, Dr. Marks and his team described the performance of the Neyman-Pearson optimal detector in non-Gaussian noise using a closed form solution.

If Dr. Marks had just revolutionized just one field of study he would be considered nothing short of a genius, to earn such high accolades from such a variety of fields of study is an accomplishment that only ranks up there with the likes of Newton and Einstein. Marks even has an award from NASA for helping them develop more power efficient communication amongst wireless arrays!

As one can see, Dr. Marks has done more with his life in his 50 some odd years on the planet, than a hundred men can do in a life time. The most exciting part is that Dr. Marks still has plenty of time left in his career to revolutionize many more areas of science. Maybe some day you can tell your grandkids that you heard of the genius of Dr. Marks and the Marks family before they became icons of the 21^st century? Visit the links below to learn more about this amazing scientist.

http://www.evoinfo.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._Marks_II